Catching Up With the Season
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Catching Up With the Season Almost half the season has passed since last I looked at an actor from the critic's side of the proscenium, and it is difficult to...
...A number of productions recently seen and, for various reasons, worth discussion, have already closed...
...It will do more to discourage theatergoing than a dozen flops...
...President's soupy saccharinity about the virtues of our first family is tasteless in a way which confirms the tastefulness of Vaughn Meader and his associates...
...If ever a character and a theme called for high tragedy, here it is-torn from the most fascinating period of American history and especially valid today...
...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Catching Up With the Season Almost half the season has passed since last I looked at an actor from the critic's side of the proscenium, and it is difficult to catch up all at once...
...Tchin-Tchin is not nearly so inept, though it suffers similar sins of superficiality and phoniness...
...It is big, loud, slick and dull...
...But the handling of such material presupposes a talent firm enough to rise above the homilies and superficialities of soap opera, as well as language which is memorable rather than merely oratorical...
...it means either hello or good-by...
...But when he falls prey to the desire to be "modern," or to imitate that dramaturgy which instinct or taste makes him feel is especially significant today, he denies his own craftsmanship and provides only an embarrassment...
...The prospect of putting the passionate Captain Ahab and his great white whale on stage intrigued the imagination...
...Night Life, Sidney Kingsley's deliberate attempt to construct a moral parable of our time and evolve a new kind of playwriting, was doomed to failure-though I had not expected it to be so clich?©ridden (situation, characters, sentiments, language) in its collection of malcontents and celebrities lost in a key club...
...Removed from their original milieu, its two characters -a husband and a wife who, when left wifeless and husbandless respectively by an affair involving their two spouses, embark on an impossible affair of their own-seem to be wandering through a woman's magazine, as if photographed by the soft lens of a slick fashion cameraman...
...The performances, by Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn, are tenable...
...Miss it at your own risk...
...When he jotted down experiences in certain specific locales-the hospital room, the street playground, the local police station-he came up with interesting if not memorable slices of life (Men in White, Dead End, Detective Story...
...In contrast Mr...
...They all take a keen, incisive, literate look at our current foibles and fables, from Shakespeare to Suez, and enable us to laugh freely and foolishly at them-and at ourselves...
...Beyond the Fringe is like a staged reading of the New Yorker's Talk of the Town in its heyday...
...At least, though, The Moon Besieged was an honest failure...
...Of three Broadway contenders just eliminated, the most surprising failure was Moby Dick, Orson Welles' theatricalization of Melville's saga, with Rod Steiger playing the lead role...
...But the production was a hollow exercise in unimaginative sound and monotonous fury, signifying little beyond its grandiose intentions and lack of brilliance...
...All this is pleasantly accomplished without either a stage full of scenery or a bag full of concessions to taste or intelligence...
...It sets back the cause of the American musical at least three generations...
...Kingsley has always been a faithful reporter...
...President, buttressed by the assorted talents of Irving Berlin, Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, Joshua Logan, Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray, is a dishonest success-one of those two-year flops which the theater continually spews up on the basis of brand-name attractiveness and selling power...
...Finally, I'm happy to report that Beyond the Fringe is a joyous romp of humanity, in the shape of four young and variegated (physically and temperamentally) Englishmen: Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore...
...but the motivations and events remain baffling...
...The Chinese title actually refers to a lovers' greeting-farewell...
...The play was adapted from a tender French comedy by Francois Billetdoux, transposed to a New York setting by American playwright Sidney Michaels...
...Many of those still running are not really worth discussing, or seeing...
...Even more embarrassing (and short-lived) was The Moon Besieged, Seyril Schochen's turgid, overly melodramatic addition to a long line of plays about the martyr of Harper's Ferry, John Brown...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
